Sunday, August 19, 2007

Camilleri in America plus a bit of politics

The Crime Scraps blog, presided over by the King of Camilleri, last week ran down the worldwide availability of Andrea Camilleri's Inspector Montalbano series on television and DVD. No DVDs in suitable format yet in Canada and the United States, but il signore Scraps did offer the delightful news that a public television station in Washington, D.C., is broadcasting the series. So now there is something to do in Washington besides watching members of the Bush administration jump ship.

That is no gratuitous snipe. The United States has just received its clearest signal yet that the administration of President George W. Bush is over, and it had nothing to do with the announced departures of chief strategist Karl Rove and press secretary Tony Snow. The obituary came in the form of a column by the syndicated commentator Charles Krauthammer.

Krauthammer has been a forceful, sometimes strident Bush booster, notably on Iraq. Headlines over his columns have included "Congress must not micromanage war," "Supreme silliness about Cheney," and "Comrade Feinstein?" for example. Another column scoffed at the perjury conviction of Vice President Dick Cheney's former aide Scooter Libby, downplaying Libby's misdeeds by comparison with lies uttered by, you guessed it, Bill Clinton and members of his administration. Like Krauthammer or not, in other words, a reader rarely has trouble figuring out where he stands.

Yet this week, with the 2008 presidential races heating up in both major U.S. political parties (Yes, they do things that far in advance here), with all the chance in the world to bash China over product-safety scandals and mining disasters or Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf over his hands-off attitude toward warlords who may be sheltering Osama bin Laden, Krauthammer wrote about ... baseball. And not just about baseball, but about the wistful yearning for redemption exemplified by a fictional character, Roy Hobbs in Bernard Malamud's The Natural. (Krauthammer was stirred to invoke Malamud by the story of Rick Ankiel, a pitcher-turned-outfielder who recently made a comeback with the St. Louis Cardinals.)

The column was escapist in matter, perhaps less so in manner. Here's how Krauthammer ended it: "(n)o one knows why Hobbs is shot. It is fate, destiny, nemesis. Perhaps the dawning of knowledge, the coming of sin. Or more prosaically, the catastrophe that awaits everyone from a single false move, wrong turn, fatal encounter. Every life has such a moment. What distinguishes us is whether — and how — we ever come back."

Coming from a normally pugnacious Bush booster, that sounds like an elegy for the Republican Party's hopes to retain the White House.

Your discussion of baseball and Rick Ankiel reminded me that the Father of Baseball and inventor of the box score Henry Chadwick was born in Exeter, Devon, England on October 5, 1824.We don't have these heated election races here in England, because we have adopted the old Soviet system and don't have an opposition. It saves all that tension on election night, and you don't have the problem of hanging chads. Scotland is of course another country with a completely different system of law, more spoiled ballot papers than Florida, and some pugnacious crime fiction writers.

Good gosh, that's something to be proud of. I knew about Chadwick and I knew he was born in England, but I didn't know you where.

As in recent election cycles, states have scrambled to schedule their primaries earlier and earlier, in part to exert greater influence on the choices of nominees, and in part for sheer prestige. There was serious speculation that Iowa would hold primaries for the 2008 presidential nomination in December 2007. That has to be enough make observers from other democratic nations scratch their heads.

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About Me

This blog is a proud winner of the 2009 Spinetingler Award for special services to the industry and its blogkeeper a proud former guest on Wisconsin Public Radio's Here on Earth. In civilian life I'm a copy editor in Philadelphia. When not reading crime fiction, I like to read history. When doing neither, I like to travel. When doing none of the above, I like listening to music or playing it, the latter rarely and badly.
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